On a night when the Jets went with their two young quarterbacks and didn’t get a lot accomplished in their passing game, they hitched their wagon to their youthful running backs, who pulled their team to a 15-12 road win over the Carolina Panthers on Saturday night.
“I thought our running back room as a collective whole, they were running the ball really, really hard, downhill, violent,” head coach Robert Saleh said of his backfield that didn’t have sideline observer Breece Hall for the second game but got positive yardage out of five backs plus those two QBs. “I’m looking forward to looking at this tape because there’s some good stuff to look at.”
The stat sheet wasn’t necessarily one of those sights for sore eyes. The Jets totaled 117 rush yards on 28 carries, a solid but not eye-popping 4.2 yards/carry. They amassed seven first downs. The only double-digit yardage run of the night by a Jets back was Israel Abanikanda’s 12-yarder.
On the other hand, the Jets rode five field goals, four by Austin Seibert to the win. And while the sledding was a little tough, the backs were not tackled for any losses and still outgained the passing game with those 117 yards to the 85 net yards compiled by Andrew Peasley and Adrian Martinez.
Braelon Allen, the big-bopping fourth-round rookie, didn’t get the start vs. the Panthers — fifth-round rookie Isaiah Davis did — but still provided some of the muscle and movement in one of the key drives of the game.
“Braelon, he had a couple,” Saleh said of the 6-1, 235-pound Wisconsin product. “It was third-and-5, third-and-6 and he had a violent 4-yard run where he just moved the entire pile. We picked him for a lot of reasons, because he’s actually really good out of the backfield in route-running, he’s really good in protection, too, we think he’s an all-around good back, a very powerful runner, too. And he’s displaying that down in, down out.”
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